Helmut Schulz

alabamamercy
Hi, so not to make a whole pity post but I always found myself needing more time than avarage to learn new things.

I know there’s all the “houdini hard” memes, but after trying to wrap my head around it, the amount of things that seem difficult to me get kind of overwhelming.

I know my way around C4D, I’ve done 3D using octane for a year or so now, so I’m comfortable with it.

Maybe this is where I went wrong but I was told “Adding Houdini To Your Arsenal” by entagma was a good guide. I was following it but very quickly got lost during the VOPS (i think it was) section.

What’s the best way to tackle houdini? I really want to wrap my head around it, but it’s quite intimidating to me.

(Also, My mathematical skills are terrible, would it be useful to get them up a bit while learning houdini? Haha)

My main goal with learning houdini is to use it with Cinema4D,

Hard to say what will work best for you as people are very different, but for me it didn't take off before I had taken on a very specific task to solve. This gave me both a reason to keep going on and a specific starting point. Risk is high to get lost in the jungle quickly otherwise, at least for me, and also to lose motivation quickly because I guess Houdini isn't the sort of tool giving you trial-and-error eye candy quickly. _If_ however you know where you want to go, start with those nice shelf tools, work through the node networks until you get a glimpse how what's happening, and branch out from there. Once there's something visible in the viewport you couldn't have done in another package you'll go on and start to dig. I bet.

PS.:
advanced (?) beginner's view.

… almost, but not quite finished project (shots still rendering, some not yet done):

Click here: [thalion-graphics.de]

It took me a while to get close to what I'd call “done” here. Started out seriously with Houdini last summer in the course of a general effort to up my skills. As a project I chose a scene featuring two characters I had already finished before, a boat ride across a stormy ocean, but put it at temporary halt in favour of this one here. Could not get render times managed in 16.5 due to escalating amounts of foam and my non-understanding of how to set up a volume material with spec for it, wanted to retry using 17, but had no nerve at the time to redo all the whitewater sims from scratch), so it had to wait, I needed a bit of sun and beach first.

Goal was to get a complete movie style scene done from beginning to end, including all stages of the pipeline, testing a workflow enabling me to get around some of Blender's restrictions and push the limits a bit further.
All the modelling, character rigging and character animation was done in Blender 2.79, the characters are the same I used in the first scene … and yes, I'm aware that I'm not the best character animator, there's definitely room for a lot of improvement.

Ocean, cloth and softbody hair, wine in the bottle, sand were done in Houdini, as was the cloud sky and the environment map baked from it, the materials & rendering itself, and last but not least all the postpro.

It was (and still is) a wild ride through SOPs, DOPs, VOPs, COPs, and ROPs, yay.
I was proud when I got the first ocean waves roll, the first foamy wave crests splash. I was really proud after I got those beach waves expanded into a large ocean. ^^
And I was utterly surprised of how utterly kind Vellum SOPs are towards the user, so simple and painless to use. ^^
It is fast as hell, and delivers accurate results. Wow.

It was and still is a great experience to put all those things together, and feel all restrictions and fetters released. Only the sky (or, well, my own lack of skills) is the limit. ^^

AND, yes, the lack of processing power. I need more CPUs, more RAM and larger HDs.

This sounds like it could be related to the problem I posted here yesterday: https://www.sidefx.com/forum/topic/59839/ [www.sidefx.com]

Unfortunately can't remember any stop code, but as I just started another “render to disk”, I might be able to check soon. However I run Houdini from command line once before and got a segmentation violation message from Mantra … I'm running H17 Indie, recent production build, on Ubuntu Linux 16 btw.